


When You Wish Upon a Star

by AppalachianApologies



Series: Appalachian's 2020 Whumptober [19]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Grieving, Or rather lack thereof, Whump, Whumptober 2020, and canonical character undeath, because cm really did that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:14:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27103291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AppalachianApologies/pseuds/AppalachianApologies
Summary: Emily dies. Spencer struggles.Day 19: Grief | Mourning a Loved One
Series: Appalachian's 2020 Whumptober [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948174
Comments: 33
Kudos: 115
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	When You Wish Upon a Star

After Emily died, Spencer fell apart. It was no secret, either.

It was extraordinarily obvious to JJ, after the fifth consecutive day of opening her door to find a broken down friend. It became a pattern of sorts - a sick pattern, but a pattern nonetheless - that JJ would wrap him in a blanket, and place him on the couch with a warm cooked meal and a mug of hot tea.

On the fifth day, JJ realized that Spencer wasn’t getting better.

Grieving didn’t help alleviate the pain, no, instead grieving shattered Spencer’s fragile mind, leaving him weak and exposed. JJ calls Hotch on the sixth morning after Emily’s “death,” begging for approval to tell Spencer the truth.

Hotch says no.

And so JJ goes back to Spencer, who’s lying on her couch, knees tucked up to his chest, face hidden in his arms. Spencer’s intelligence makes it easy to forget he’s rather emotionally constipated. She supposes that it’s a bit inevitable after being forced to run a family at ten years old. He’s never had a parent to get comfort from.

JJ can tell from the way Spencer holds himself that he isn’t asleep, so she doesn’t feel that bad when she sits down next to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Spence,”

Withdrawing one hand from his face, Spencer looks up at her and questions, “Hmm?”

Swallowing, JJ notes, “I think you need to talk with someone,”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve had six panic attacks in the past five days, and it’s burning you out. I don’t want to keep watching you suffer.”

Spencer takes a deep breath, squirming around the couch until he can face JJ without craning his head. He knows that she’s right. Panic attacks take all of his energy out of him, and Spencer doesn’t have much to give. Even his meds aren’t helping him anymore. “Yeah.”

JJ smiles sadly. “Hotch and I can get everything set up, okay? We can make all of the calls and drive you-”

“It’s okay,” Spencer interrupts softly. “I can go myself.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Spencer pretends he doesn’t see his best friend’s shoulders sag in relief.

*

It only takes one appointment for Spencer’s medications to be changed. Now he’s taking 25mg more of Zoloft daily, but Spencer’s partly sure that his therapist wants to pin him with OCD as well. She also hands him a prescription for Xanax, “Take as needed.”

Spencer feels so broken he doesn’t know when he needs it. 

When he gets back to his apartment, he feels fine for a solid two and a half minutes before the walls begin closing in. Before the air attempts to suffocate him, memories of Emily floating around his brain.

Because that’s all they are now.

Memories.

She’s gone, once and for all.

Spencer will never see her smile, and he’ll never hear another witty joke from her. He’ll never be teased by her sisterly jabs, and she’ll never be here to defend him from snarky LEOs. Spencer will never see Emily ever again.

When he falls to the floor, Spencer wonders if this is what his therapist meant when she said, “Take as needed.”

Instead, he cradles the white paper bag from the pharmacy into his chest, wishing that Emily would replace it. It feels almost cruel, replacing a beloved friend, a family member, with a bottle of pills.

Well, he supposes, it’s more than a single bottle of pills. That has to count for something at least. Right?

Somehow, Spencer ends up on the steps of JJ’s home, white-knuckling his two new orange bottles. He knows that JJ’s expecting him, after all, why break a six day pattern now?

JJ holds him close, just like Emily used to (and never will again), and ushers him inside, closing the cold air out. This time, Spencer makes it to the couch before his entire body collapses into it, sobs taking over.

It’s so incredibly cruel, a life being taken from him.

Spencer doesn’t think anything in his life has hurt him this badly.

There’s a hole in his heart that’s Emily shaped, and he doesn’t ever want it to heal over. He wants the physical pain in his chest to stay forever, just to remind him of the memories he’ll never get to have with Emily.

JJ rubs his back, pulls him into countless hugs, but nothing helps.

It’s a pain so raw, Spencer wonders how anyone in the world goes on after losing someone they loved so dearly. It feels like fingers are scratching against his insides, and he wants them gone.

Spencer doesn’t want the hurt.

He wants Emily.

He wants to be held by her one last time. He wants to hear how many times Emily can make lesbian references before the local PD stops hitting on her. He wants to smell the strange scent that can only be described as Emily: coconut shampoo and cat food. He wants to see her grin after calling Rossi an old man, ducking as he flicks a pen at her. 

Spencer wants Emily.

And if there’s one thing he’ll never have ever again, it’s Emily.

It’s his sanity.

His sobs catch in his throat so tightly that he just stops breathing. Spencer wants all of these feelings gone. He wants Emily to tell him that it will all be alright.

Instead, he gets JJ on one side and Will on the other, attempting to get him to take a breath before his body gives up and faints. Instead, between broken cries he’s being fed water. Instead, Spencer gets a best friend reading the instructions on his little orange bottles.

Rather than Emily, Spencer gets a half pill downed in water. He gets a hug from everyone but Emily. He gets a glass of juice, just to ensure his body won’t shut down.

Spencer’s body shuts down.

He wouldn’t quite call it catatonia, after all, that hasn’t happened since Dowd, but it isn’t too far off. Spencer’s body is asleep, and his mind wants to follow, it does so badly, but it won’t.

Emily used to call his mind “beautiful.” She doesn’t call it that anymore because she’s dead. She’ll never call it that anymore. She’ll never sit and let Spencer ramble about oddly specific topics ever again.

Spencer has too many emotions, and they all get jumbled up, creating nothing, and everything all at once.

Henry waddles over to babble at him, and Spencer gets one more emotion. He can’t place what this new one is, but he doesn’t think it’s bad. Unfortunately, it can’t shine through all of his other wants.

All of his other needs.

Spencer can’t tell if he’s asleep, or simply unmoving. He isn’t sure if his brain is in a state of rest or mania, because he’s feeling both at the moment. His chest aches worse than when anthrax coated them, and he supposes that’s only fair.

After all, Emily got a stake in his chest, why shouldn’t he?

Because that’s what it feels like.

A sharp wooden stake straight through his heart, barely poking out his back. The problem is, his wooden stake won’t leave his body, and Spencer isn’t sure he wants it to.

Spencer wants Emily to come back to him.

Spencer wants Emily to come back.

Spencer has never gotten what he wants. He should’ve learned that lesson when he was ten years old, but he seems to have forgotten it.

Spencer’s back in his own apartment, wondering how many times he’s going to do the same trip over and over again. How many times he’ll go through the same cycle in real life, and in his head. 

When Hotch calls him, Spencer breaks down.

He thinks that a few hours without breaking down is a record since Emily died, and he should be proud of himself. Instead, Spencer feels guilty. How dare he get over Emily? It’s not fair. None of this is fair. 

Spencer feels childish when he tells Hotch this, but he doesn’t care.

Because it’s the truth. This isn’t fair. Emily’s saved so many people in her life. Emily has brightened so many days. Emily has survived and endured so much in her life.

Had.

Emily had survived and endured so much in her life. She didn’t survive this though, and Spencer certainly can’t endure the fallout he’s brought upon himself.

Hotch arrives at his apartment three hundred seconds, minutes, hours, days, millenia later, carrying tupperware full of spaghetti. 

They sit on the couch, and Spencer stares at the food. He wishes he could eat dinner one more time with Emily. He wishes that she could laugh at his chopsticks skills, or rather, lack thereof. He wishes that he could watch her pick out a doughnut the second Garcia opens the box, before he can even blink an eye.

Spencer brings his knees up to his chest, wishing for Emily.

He slips back into his state of emptiness. As empty as Emily’s chest was when the stake cut through her precious organs, taking her from the world that Spencer lives in. Spencer’s feelings jumble around for hours, until sunlight tries its best to peek through his curtains.

He makes it through the entire day.

No he doesn’t.

At six that night he somehow finds himself on JJ’s doorstep, pattern continuing. The only thing that could disrupt his beloved pattern is Emily, and she’ll never be back.

Spencer doesn’t know what he is and isn’t doing, until JJ puts her palms on his shoulders, his face, begging him to breathe. Spencer just watches her, wondering why she’s asking for such a thing. It’s only when he becomes light headed, when his knees begin to wobble, when he finally takes a breath, gulping the glorious air around him.

He wonders what Emily’s last breath felt like.

JJ leads him to the couch, where he sits. Where he sits and cries.

And cries,

And cries.

Spencer wonders how long he can cry for a woman that won’t ever come back to him. How long he can cry for his friend, who was too good for this world whether or not she believed it. Spencer supposes that he will probably cry for the rest of his life.

A warm cooked meal and a mug of tea is set in front of him, and Spencer wishes that Emily was instead placed in front of him. 

JJ places Henry in front of Spencer, and he smiles for the first time in a week.

Henry, with his grubby little fingers, reaches up to touch Spencer’s hair. And so the older man puts Henry on his lap, letting him grasp his hair. 

“Hi Spence,” Henry babbles, still reaching for his hair.

Holding him close, Spencer softly replies, “Hi Henry. What’re you up to?”

Henry stands up on Spencer’s legs, grabbing the side of Spencer’s ear, not that he minds. “Magic!” His godson replies.

Spencer feels his heart stutter. Henry’s trying to grab a quarter from the back of Spencer’s ear, just like his godfather does to him. All of a sudden, the hole in his chest doesn’t seem so gaping.

“Yeah, buddy?” He asks, tears falling down his cheek.

“Yeah!” But after retrieving no quarter, Henry clambers back down, sliding off the side of Spencer’s legs to sit behind him on the couch. Looking up at his godfather, his face scrunches up. “Sad?”

Spencer shakes his head, wiping the tears from his cheek with his sleeve. “No buddy, I’m okay,” Henry doesn’t look convinced, and Spencer can’t blame him. The little boy has good intuition, he could be a profiler when he grows up.

“Read to me?” He asks, pointing to a book on the coffee table with a bright green cover and cartoon dinosaurs littering the front.

With a smile, Spencer agrees, “Yeah, let’s read! Do you want to sit on my lap?”

Henry nods, finding his place on Spencer’s thighs, resting his head against his collar bone. Through broken swallows and tears made of happiness and grief, Spencer reads.

JJ lets them be, talking to Will in hushed tones in the kitchen. When she peeks over the archway to check on them, both are asleep, heads lolled to the side.

Spencer wakes for what feels like the first time in a week, heart aching.

He wishes Emily were here to give him a hug and watch him make rockets out of old film canisters. He wishes that she would laugh at his statistics that he didn’t realize were funny, and shake his hair around his eyes.

But that’s all they are: Wishes.

“Hey, Spence,” JJ greets with a soft smile. That’s what he’s been getting. Soft smile. Pity smiles. Smiles that are supposed to heal the wound in his heart.

Looking at her shoulder, Spencer replies, “Hi.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I miss Emily.” It’s not a feeling, it’s not an emotion, but it’s the only thing that he can process. That single thought. He misses Emily.

It’s not just “missing” her though. It’s aching for her. It’s pleading with a reaper that doesn’t exist to get her back, and it’s-

“I miss her too,” JJ confesses, sitting down with a sigh. 

“I don’t want to stop missing her either,” Spencer muses. “I just… Want her back.”

JJ puts a comforting hand on his thigh. “I’m sorry, Spence,”

“I didn’t think it would hurt this much.”

Keeping her hand on his leg, JJ nods. “The first person you lose hurts the most.”

With a frown Spencer points out, “But this isn’t the first, right? I- I mean, my dad, and Gideon?”

“Leaving isn’t the same as losing,” She whispers back. “And even if your brain doesn’t realize that, your heart does.”

Spencer looks down at his lap, both of his hands, and one of JJ’s.

If only Emily’s hand was also there.

He sighs. “It’s a strange phenomenon that emotional pain can feel physical. In people with congenital insensitivity to physical pain, they also can’t feel emotional pain. The same part of our brain responds to it, even if there aren’t nerves to find emotional pain.”

“Yeah?” JJ asks, guiding Spencer to continue. She understands that sometimes Spencer can only communicate in proofs, facts that he knows.

“Our brains don’t like it,”

“Don’t like what?”

“Our brains don’t like feeling emotional pain.” Spencer clarifies. “Because we don’t know how to understand it. Signals of pain are sent to our brains, but there’s no source. So our brain gives us a source. It’s the easiest type of psychosomatic pain to feel,”

JJ turns so that she’s facing him completely, even if Spencer continues to look down. “The pain is real, Spence. What you’re feeling is real, even if your brain doesn’t get it,”

Frowning, Spencer confesses, “I’m always supposed to understand things. I’m built on logic,” He continues, “This shouldn’t be a problem for me.”

“Spence, you just lost a friend, it’s okay to feel things.”

“I feel…” Spencer trails off, picking at his cuticles until JJ pulls his hand away to intertwine with her own. “I feel sad.”

JJ nods, softly agreeing, “Yeah.”

“I’ve never felt sad like this before. Not in my entire life.”

“That’s how it goes,” JJ sighs, squeezing Spencer’s hand. “Grief is the most raw form of sadness.”

Spencer doesn’t make any indication that he’s listening until he quietly agrees, “There’s nothing else in me. Just. Sadness.”

“Oh, Spence, I’m so sorry,”

“I don’t want it to go away though,” He murmurs, his dehydrated body somehow letting more tears roll down his face. “I don’t want to forget Emily. I don’t want to forget how she made me feel.”

“Grieving isn’t forgetting,”

“Yeah.” Spencer agrees, in the way that he definitely doesn’t agree.

Luckily, JJ notices it. “Spence,” She starts, wondering how to soothe her best friend. “Grieving is natural. It’s normal. You can’t just hide away from it.”

Using his free hand to rub tears off his cheeks, Spencer quietly sobs, “I don’t want to grieve,”

“Spence,”

“I want her back. I don’t care if it sounds childish. I want her back,”

“I know, Spence.”

“I want her back.”

~~

**a/n previously written on 10/16/20:** Hello, I hope everyone is doing okay. I just finished writing this fic, and I wanted to write my author’s note while everything is still fresh. I wrote about 1k words of this, before I stopped, realizing that there were tears in my eyes. I wrote about 500 more words before I just couldn’t continue. To a degree, author’s always put themselves in the characters they write, but I didn’t realize what was happening until I was 1.5k words in. I wasn’t writing about Spencer and Emily, I was writing about me. And my friend.

I lost my friend earlier this year, very suddenly. He woke up one day feeling mildly uncomfortable, and within the next twenty four hours, he had passed away. It was right in the beginning of quarantine, and it feels like nobody has been able to properly grieve for him, because we couldn’t hold a funeral, or a vigil, or anything. And as I was writing this, it just hit me like a fucking truck.

These things weren’t supposed to happen to me. You always hear of the, “Hug your loved ones because you don’t know when you won’t be able to,” But this wasn't supposed to happen to me! And it certainly wasn’t supposed to happen to a goddamn sixteen year old boy.

And so it hit me: The childish thought of: it’s not fair. He was only sixteen fucking years old, and he’s dead. That’s not supposed to happen. It’s not fucking fair. I was crying in earnest, disgusting snot on my sweatshirt and everything at this point. Why do stupid fucking fictional characters get to come back to life, but my friend doesn’t? It’s not fair. I would do anything to get him back. And this entire fic just turned into that. He’s gone, and it’s. not. fair. That a fictional character got to come back to life. I know it’s childish. But it’s not fair.

And I cried, and cried, and cried, and somehow finished this fic with blurry eyes and feeling the raw emotion of: sadness. It’s a horrible feeling.

Many pints of blood were used in an attempt to save him, and I’m sure over in fictional world, many pints of blood were used to save Emily. If you’re able to, please donate blood or platelets. It can save so many lives.

Go give your friends a virtual hug, snuggle your family, and I love you all.

Take care.

**Author's Note:**

> I love you all very much, and I hope you all are doing okay. If you find yourself in a bad or scary situation, here are some hotlines (Please keep in mind that the written out numbers are US hotlines)
> 
> National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255  
> National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673  
> National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
> 
> If you don't live in America and need someone to talk to, here's a list of [international hotlines.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines)  
> You are not alone, and I love you all <3
> 
> Much love to all of you, and take care until tomorrow <3


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